Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here
And this is the Acer Nitro 5. Now, this is a laptop
That's geared towards that whole inexpensive gaming market. It's 900 bucks.
It's got a GTX 1050 Ti, 256 gigs of SSD and a Kaby Lake chip in here. I mean,
There's a lot of stuff that I like about this thing, but if you'll notice the title of this video,
I don't
openly recommend this thing to everybody and the reason why is
because I feel like there's a better option than this for people who are
actually interested in this and it's not because this is a bad laptop,
This is actually a very good laptop
But as you'll see, there's something a little bit better than this
So the things that I do like about it. First,
I really like the build quality. This thing looks less gamer,
I should say? Than the average cheap gaming laptop, so it has a red strip down here
But it's not that bright cherry red, it's more like a muted metallic burgundy color. It's still red
It's not my favorite thing
but I think it's a lot better than a lot of gaming laptops and
Everything else on the top at least is black, even that logo, the Acer logo is just simple black
and the components they've chosen in here are good. The 1050 Ti
Is that sweet spot for inexpensive 1080p gaming
The port selection is pretty standard for this price. You're getting three USB-A's and one USB-C,
not Thunderbolt 3 though
I like the screen, it's not amazing. It's an IPS screen, and it looks not bad. I mean it's a $900 gaming laptop
You're not gonna get 4K color accurate screens at this price, so yeah
I'm happy with the screen. The keyboard and the trackpad are also both good.
The keyboard is comfortable to use, nice layout. The one thing
That's a little bit weird on the layout is that the Shift and the Up arrow are really close together now
I personally didn't have any issues using it
but I think it'll depend on how your
Keyboard habits are if you- I don't know, if you hit your shift in a particular way
You might hit the Up arrow at the same time
But I don't have any issues
Trackpad is also really good, Windows Precision drivers
Acer has totally gone into the whole Windows Precision driver thing
They don't use anymore Elan or Synaptics drivers from what I've seen recently, so that's really nice
The speakers are located on the bottom, and they don't sound terrible or anything, they don't sound great
But it's a $900 gaming laptop. They kind of sound as you would expect
The build quality in the Nitro 5 is good
It's got a metal top panel, but everything else is plastic including the bottom panel,
but all the plastic parts feel good
There's access to the 2.5 inch SATA drive and the RAM slots through some hatches
But if you want to go deeper, you can remove the whole panel. The batteries down here
It's a 48 watt hour battery, and I'm getting a little bit less than four hours of battery life
And that's with the screen at 250 nits. It's so depending what you do
You'll be around there. Now so far everything sounds good, right?
Everything seems proper on this laptop
But this is my one issue with this thing. The thermal design is...
Not ideal, so if you look over here
You can see the CPU and the GPU and there's two heat pipes that pull heat away from these chips
Which are cooled with these two fans
And I don't like seeing game laptops designed like this
So on a regular laptop that doesn't have a ton of thermal output
This is fine because I mean, it's a very effective and space efficient way of cooling things down
but on a gaming laptop with the GTX 1050 Ti
This is not ideal
And what ends up happening is that the heat from the CPU
Has to travel along this pipe pass the GPU before we get cooled by the two fans
And if you use your laptop for a really long time, the CPU builds up heat. Now the VX 15 is another
inexpensive laptop from Acer and that thing has a much better thermal design to me
There's still two heat pipes and two fans
But because the two fans are located on opposite ends,
each fan is gonna pull heat more readily from the closer chip
And you just get better thermal performance
Now if all you're doing is just browsing the web or just doing light stuff or
even playing games for just really short bursts for like
15-20 minutes, then you literally will never notice it. You will not see any kind of thermal issues
But if you play games for a long time like over an hour
You'll notice that the CPU temperature starts to creep up and up and
eventually you'll hit that wall. The one thermal advantage that I would
say the Nitro 5 has is that it does have "CoolBoost" technology
which is basically built-in software to allow you to control the fans.
Now, the VX 15 does not have that and this does
and it can be helpful. The thing is you can always get like third-party software to control the fans
But this has it straight from the factory. So the fan on is on this thing at idle is not very loud
It's actually quite quiet, on load
it's a little bit louder, audible, but not too bad, but with CoolBoost on, this thing is quite loud
And it's still not good enough to maintain really high clock speeds for
extended periods of time despite it being super loud
So here's the thing, for $900, the market is very competitive right now
There's a lot of good options to choose from, the VX 15 the
Dell 7567, the upcoming 7577. This thing, the Nitro 5, they're all like kind of in that market
So if you're going to make a laptop that competes with this stuff,
if you're gonna spend the time and the resources
Like Acer did, to make the Nitro 5 a brand new laptop
Why like, why not make it something just more different?
There's nothing about this thing that makes it a compelling purchase
Okay, I take that back. There's two things that are unique about this, that don't matter to me
But I, to be fair I need to just kind of put this out there for full disclosure
This thing has a design like a visual design
That's better than the other laptops that it competes with
The red isn't super obnoxious and the rest of it is pretty simple
The screen is also ever so slightly better than the VX 15 and the Dell 7567 screen
They're all IPS, but this one's just a little bit brighter, a little bit more color accurate
We're talking like 2 or 3%, so if those things are important to you
And you don't mind the thermal issues, sure, go for this thing,
but for most people, I wouldn't recommend this. The Acer VX 15 is just better all-around.
Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video!
Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it.
See you guys next time!